Almost 19 months after having seized the domains rojadirecta.com and rojadirecta.org, the U.S. Government has withdrawn its complaint against these domains and the Court has already ordered their return.

On January 31, 2011 the U.S. government seized our domains rojadirecta.com and rojadirecta.org as part of its operation “Operation In Our Sites”. We immediately initiated talks with the government, through our legal representatives in San Francisco and New York, in order to obtain the return of the same. Since it is impossible at this stage to recover domains amicably, we filed a complaint against the Government, the Department of Homeland Security and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency of the United States of America. In response to our complaint and as a requirement to keep the seized domains, the Government proceeded to sue both domains, which it withdrew today more than a year later and which has led, almost instantly, the Court of the Southern District of New York to order the return of the domains.

Shortly after learning of the court order, we started proceedings with the organizations responsible for all .com and .org domain registrations (Verisign and PIR respectively) in order to restore the domains. In the coming hours Rojadirecta will again be accessible from rojadirecta.com and rojadirecta.org, that is from the domains that never should have been censored.

Update:
– Since 31-Aug-2012 16:49:15 UTC the rojadirecta.org domain points to the Rojadirecta site.
– Finally since 05 Sep 2012 19:14:44 UTC the rojadirecta.com domain also points again to the Rojadirecta site.

At the time of this post’s writing, this blog has only two entries, and oddly enough, these reveal the errors made by Google and MLB. Therefore, Google is censoring the two links from Rojadirecta to our criticism of Google found on the web page and the blog homepage. It is worth pointing out that the blog does not contain links to broadcasts of sporting events of any kind, and what is worse, MLB did not even complain about blog.rojadirecta.es (as we mentioned in the previous paragraph).

We believe that this is only a coincidence, but it would be nice to have a quick solution and to know the explanations for everything that has happened to lead to the filtering of so many results from Rojadirecta, from two different domains and based on two different complaints, since none of the documents published by Chilling Effects demand the filtering of everything being censored, and also keeping in mind that one of these complaints does not even demand that anything be eliminated from the search engine. According to what is being told to us by TorrentFreak (a site dedicated to news related to the world of P2P and copyrights), they asked Google for an explanation 6 days ago, but they have not received any response.

Update (Nov 20th. 2012):
We are currently trying to index http://test.rojadirecta.es/ at Google. Despite that web address has never infringed nor linked to any infringed copyrighted content, unfortunately we expect Google to filter also that result.

On Saturday, we confirmed that www.rojadirecta.es was no longer appearing in Google’s search results. The company owner of the popular search engine had received a complaint related to the DMCA and, because of this, eliminated the homepage for rojadirecta.es from its search results. Google did not provide us with a copy of the complaint (or we simply did not receive it) so we decided to get in contact with Chilling Effects, who had processed the complaint that Google sent them very quickly. Once the complaint became available on the Chilling Effects web site, we discovered that it was made by the Major League Baseball.

Oddly enough, the complaint was not related to Google’s search engine. In fact, it was sent to Google’s advertising program, Adsense. For these reasons, it seems as though Google eliminated rojadirecta.es from its search results even though this was not what MLB had requested, since their intentions were apparently to simply eliminate Rojadirecta from the Adsense advertising program.

This apparent mistake on Google’s part was perhaps the result of the following false statements made by MLB:

Rojadirecta does not participate in Google’s Adsense program so it is impossible to eliminate it from that program. Moreover, Rojadirecta does not even publish banners or contextual ads.

“The Website streams live copyrighted MLB Telecasts”

Not only does Rojadirecta not transmit the aforementioned content, but it does not directly transmit any other type of audio or video content. Rojadirecta is simply an index of sporting events available on the Internet and not a provider of audio and video content.

Incidentally, we believe this is not the first error of this kind made by Google that we’ve had to deal with. In 2007 our entire rojadirecta.com domain was blocked because of a complaint regarding the specific http://www.rojadirecta.com address (something which does not coincide with Google’s instructions for DMCA-related complaints in which it asks for conflicting keywords and their corresponding list of addresses). Something similar happened to The Pirate Bay in 2009 though Google was quick to correct the error. That isn’t the case here however, seeing as this domain has been completely banned for 4 years with hundreds (actually, millions) of search results deleted (e.g. site:rojadirecta.com or, site:forum.rojadirecta.com).

In any case, as it refers to Google, it is fair to say that we do not believe that they have acted in bad faith.

Regarding MLB, we believe that the report sent to Google Adsense was not sent in bad faith either. Apparently, they do not have anything to gain from reporting a website to an advertising program when the site does not participate in it. Thus, it would seem obvious that this was only a mistake, as long as the responsible party did not know that redirection by frames was involved. Regardless, alleging that Rojadirecta transmits such contents is a very serious matter. In fact, it is a rather serious problem that a professional whose responsibility is to protect copyright on audio and video content found on the Internet cannot distinguish between sites that host and transmit content and sites that simply index other pages or streams. Furthermore, if they were aware that Rojadirecta does not transmit content but used the complaint to force Google to act in their interests, the problem is a much more serious one indeed.

Fortunately, Google’s algorithm replaced the deleted address with a Rojadirecta IP address. Therefore, it has at least always continued to appear among the first search results for “rojadirecta”.